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1 • Fedora 42 (by JOH451 on 2025-04-21 01:29:26 GMT from United Kingdom)
I too tested Fedora 42 in the last week and had similar experiences to Jesse. To say I was disappointed is an understatement. Personally I'd say the release was rushed out before it was ready.
The big issue for me was the obvious desire to force Wayland onto users while it still has problems. At least with the KDE edition it was possible to install X11 and that fixed a lot of the problems. Unfortunately the workstation edition defaults to Gnome and apparently X11 isn't available in the repositories.
I eventually managed to get Fedora 42 KDE working to a point where I was able to replace my Fedora 41 KDE test environment. If I was putting it into a production environment then I would probably have stayed with Fedora 41.
This experience has totally put me off using Fedora and probably future Red Hat releases.
It was also the worst KDE experience I have had for some time. I'm currently a Gnome user who has been considering a move to KDE in the future after being impressed by other KDE 6.x implementations. If my thinking was based purely on my experience with Fedora 42 then that particular project would be cancelled..
In fairness to KDE this was the fault of Fedora 42 rather than KDE itself. It still left a bad taste though.
In summary I refer back to my earlier statement that the release has the release was rushed out before it was ready.
2 • Fedora and RH (by mintman on 2025-04-21 02:20:16 GMT from Australia)
It's reviews like this which make me thank the developers of Linux Mint every day - for all Fedora's links to the RH corporation (I know they claim they're a community distribution but if it looks like a duck...) you'd think they could do a bit more QA before they push stuff out the door.
Maybe they spend all that time astroturfing forums about how great their tech is rather than focusing on putting out something useable.
Clem and his crew just focus on the users, and it shows.
3 • Which is your favourite command line text editor? (by V2 on 2025-04-21 03:05:49 GMT from United States)
My favorite is mcedit. Looks a lot like old DOS edit. Can copy text between files. Easy to use UI.
4 • Fedora 42 Plasma updates (by Scott Dowdle on 2025-04-21 03:07:16 GMT from United States)
A bunch of updates have been released this weekend... and Plasma has been rev'ed. Might be worth trying again.
So far as the idea that maybe they switched to Wayland too early... umm, no. You know how long GNOME has defaulted to Wayland in Fedora now? Wayland was the Plasma default in F41 as well. Someone has to do it and Fedora has been doing it for 2+ decades. That being adopting stuff first and getting it in more people's hands... and helping to get the bugs worked out. I don't ever want them to change their role.
5 • Which is your favourite command line text editor? (by V2 on 2025-04-21 03:05:50 GMT from United States)
My favorite is mcedit. Looks a lot like old DOS edit. Can copy text between files. Easy to use UI.
6 • Fedora 42 (by Andy Prough on 2025-04-21 03:35:18 GMT from Switzerland)
I would think that Fedora has a lot of RedHat and IBM engineering and money resources available, it's kind of odd that they have put out such a poorly performing distro. I compare this to the distro I currently use, Trisquel, which only has a smaller group of developers and yet has been able to consistently put out high quality versions. Seems like the powers-that-be at Fedora should take a breath and work on the distro's fundamentals instead of always trying to change everything with every new version.
7 • Text editors (by Bobbie Sellers on 2025-04-21 04:53:18 GMT from United States)
I use both KWrite and Kate on PCLinuxOS using KDE's excellent and light-weight
(comparatively) Plasma 5.27.11 under X11. Thanks for the excellent review of
the latest Fedora attempt. I have used Kate as root to edit Grub2 files in the
past.
It is very rare that I ever have a problem using PCLinuxOS and I use it for a great
many hours though I have cut back since breaking an ankle.
bliss
8 • Text editor and Fedora (by Keith S on 2025-04-21 05:08:29 GMT from United States)
It took me awhile to acquire skills in vi but it has been well worth it. It may seem silly, but keeping my hands on the keyboard to maneuver around on the screen is a huge help when thoughts are coming thick and fast. Vim is usually the version offered in Linux distros, so I use that when I have to.
It is unsurprising to me that the new Fedora release is so rough around the edges. There's no money in it for Red Hat so the "community distribution" is almost certainly a bothersome chore put out grudgingly to keep people quiet. I don't see why anyone has to promote Wayland, or Systemd, or any of the other stuff Red Hat has pushed into the Linux community. X still works, SysV and other init systems still work, and I personally don't see any major improvements that would make it worthwhile to switch to Red Hat's way of doing things. Apparently it offers convenience and higher margins for Red Hat, so work will continue on their projects and I expect pressure to conform to their model will increase. I do hope they work out their bugs, but that particular set of bugs is not anything I want to put effort into.
9 • Text editor (by Jasper on 2025-04-21 05:56:35 GMT from United Kingdom)
Tilde is the only command-line editor with what I would regard as a good interface - standard menu bars, standard shortcuts. You already know how to use it, even though you've never used it before.
10 • Text editor - Micro! (by FlorianB on 2025-04-21 06:52:40 GMT from Germany)
Micro. It's like nano with some comfort functions added and very good mouse support. I'm not a programmer so my main use case is editing a config file or the occasional bash script, using vim is overkill for me.
11 • Text Editor (by Treen HQ on 2025-04-21 07:19:27 GMT from United Kingdom)
Gedit - small, simple, reliable.
12 • CLI text editors (by AdamB on 2025-04-21 07:36:03 GMT from Australia)
There have been occasions when vi/vim was the only cli text editor available, but I have never been able to memorise how to use it.
For most of my time with Linux (quite a few years now), and more recently with BSD, I have heavily used Nano; it took me some time to get used to it, but I am now comfortable with it - it is well suited for editing configuration files.
In the last year or two, I have discovered Tilde, which, being a CUA editor, is compatible with GUI editors such as MATE's Pluma. It is well suited to any type of text files. but unfortunately is not in the repositories of Debian Testing or Devuan Testing.
13 • Text Editor (by borgio3 on 2025-04-21 07:43:16 GMT from Italy)
Bluefish and Geany. Works as text editor and html editor.
14 • Fedora mess, I will not touch it again (by Hank on 2025-04-21 07:48:30 GMT from Germany)
A short, very short, test, as aborted, showed Red Hat IBM released an even worse mess than many windows updates. Something extremely hard to beat.
No money left for Quality Assurance because it all went on promotion, advertising and self
satisfying fud claims.
15 • What is your text editor of choice ? (by eb on 2025-04-21 08:16:20 GMT from France)
Elvis ; much lighter than Vim.
With a good .elvisrc, I easily can encode my .html pages with utf8, although Elvis cannot encode text with utf8 (nvi can) ; convenient also for cleaning and reading logs.
16 • Installing Fedora 42 via Ventoy (by Nikola on 2025-04-21 08:25:27 GMT from Serbia)
I just want to warn people when they want to use Ventoy when they install Fedora 42. The new installation breaks the Ventoy USB. When you make a Ventoy USB, you get 2 partitions, one with the boot files, the other for the .iso files.
The boot partition on that USB after you finished installing Fedore 42 is erased.
Why? I don't know. This was the first instance I had experience that. With Fedora 41 is not the case. Just like with the other top 15 linux distros on the list here, just Fedora 42.
Just wanted to warn you all. I used rufus after to test again, and the USB is OK after I installed Fedora 42 again.
17 • Fedora, KDE, etc. (by thatguy on 2025-04-21 08:57:11 GMT from United States)
Sounds like Jesse had a pretty miserable experience with Fedora 42's KDE option. Especially galling is the defaulting to the older Anaconda while Gnome gets the newer, presumably less bad version.
I haven't installed 42, but have upgraded a few machines that had 41, both without issues, though lately Fedora has decided not to respect my fstab - it refuses to mount my ntfs media drives, in 42 and Rawhide. For a while dolphin was refusing to remember tabs, folders, etc. but that seems to be a KDE rather than Fedora issue.
As for performance/memory, my hardware is somewhat more modern than Jesse's but I've not noticed any issues, and in checking memory use at idle before stating anything big, it seems like all KDE instances use at least 1.8GB RAM or more for me. Fedora uses a fair bit more, but not enough to be noticeable even on an N97 laptop.
My favorite cli text editor is none of the above, rather the mcedit component of the wonderful mc double pane file manager (and more). Love mc!
18 • text editor (by Jake on 2025-04-21 09:31:37 GMT from United States)
I use a GUI text editor, the default for the OS I am using. Occasionally I will use Notepad++.
19 • Fedora (by Microlinux on 2025-04-21 09:54:04 GMT from France)
Fedora is the Linux of the future. So I will gladly use it in the future. In the meantime, Rocky Linux is perfect. :)
20 • Text editors (by David on 2025-04-21 11:11:30 GMT from United Kingdom)
I voted for Nano as a command-line program, although I'm more likely to use Mousepad.
Gedit, like most parts of Gnome, is a disaster waiting to happen. If you are a clumsy typist, you may press Ctrl-D for Ctrl-F — and instead of starting a search it will delete the current line!
21 • type kde hatred (by HeroicPenguin on 2025-04-21 11:14:53 GMT from Croatia)
I run fedora kde for 2 years now and upgraded to 42 yesterday.
All these so called issues are hallucinated by manical gnome fanatics.
Fedora kde run fast efficient and updates with reboot are default on all kde 6 distros. It can be disabled but hey why would jesse do objective review of kde distro.
and i use gui editor because life is too short for anything command line.
22 • cli editor (by goodman on 2025-04-21 11:28:56 GMT from United States)
I have used for years vim, occasional using gvim, with of late using emacs.
23 • Fedora 42 (by Carlos Felipe on 2025-04-21 11:46:14 GMT from Brazil)
Fedora is a distribution that had everything to be the best Linux distro if IBM/Red Hat thought that an unfinished product was worth finishing. Fedora is just a lab experiment and the users are the mice getting free cheese. For them, Fedora has no direct commercial value, they don't think about making money from it. By the way, I've been eating free cheese for a few years now.
24 • Fedora RAM hog (by Wally on 2025-04-21 12:13:08 GMT from Australia)
Took a quick look at Fedora 42. Using around 2.3GB at startup. System Monitor shows "Calendar reminders" using around 700MB. It's at /etc/xdg/autostart/org.kde.calendaracc.desktop. Removed that, and RAM went down to around 1.6GB, which is a bit higher than my KDE neon at 1.3GB, but not out of the ballpark. Other than that, I'll keep neon.
25 • @1, Fedora Wayland, Plasma, @3, Fedora and Mint (by Wally on 2025-04-21 12:32:43 GMT from Australia)
@1, "The big issue for me was the obvious desire to force Wayland onto users while it still has problems." I've been using Plasma 6 with Wayland for some time now on KDE neon and Tuxedo OS. Works fine. Didn't see anything in the review that applied to Wayland in particular, just some things in Fedora's implementation.
@3, "Clem and his crew just focus on the users, and it shows." They do a great job, but, Clem and his crew begin by basing on either Ubuntu LTS or Debian, so a lot of the credit should go upstream to their sources. Much more work creating a distro from scratch, like Fedora, as opposed to basing it on, and adding to someone else's work. While Mint is indeed excellent, I don't use it because they don't provide my favored DEs. But I don't feel slighted in the least. Ubuntu and other derivatives work great as well.
26 • vi and kde (by Dave on 2025-04-21 12:34:33 GMT from Australia)
I've had to use vi for work, I know only enough to do basics, which is enough. I despise it's unnecessarily "hard for the sake of hard" design, but everything else always seems to have weird quirks running over ssh. Even vim, while vi always behaves as expected.
I wish I knew why Kwrite and Kate both exist, they should just smoosh them into one.
27 • Fedora/KDE (by Sam Crawford on 2025-04-21 12:38:31 GMT from United States)
Jessie, it would be interesting to see you test openSUSE Tumbleweed with a Fedora installation and compare the results of the two in a review.
28 • Nano (by Cesare on 2025-04-21 13:02:07 GMT from Italy)
Nano is the simplest command line text editor in Linux.
29 • Fedora, Ultramarine and Pine64 (by penguinx86 on 2025-04-21 13:05:02 GMT from United States)
I just can't get into Fedora. I don't like Gnome and it has problems playing videos. Ultramarine fixes all that with Xfce as the desktop interface and it includes missing multimedia Codecs. Ultramarine is what Fedora should have been in the first place.
It's interesting that Pine64 is using Debian for some mobile devices. But last time I checked, the Pinebook Pro laptop was still running Manjaro with the KDE desktop interface. Manjaro and KDE are the reasons I haven't bought a Pinebook Pro. If I could order one with Debian and Xfce instead, I'd buy one for sure.
Also, I'm old school and I use the vi text editor. It's what I'm the most familiar with after working as a UNIX sysadmin for 10 years before Y2k. vi is always there, even if your system only comes up half way in single user mode without the /usr partition mounted. For disaster recovery, sometimes vi is all that's available.
30 • Fedora 41/42 KDE: good testbed for RHEL (by GTFR on 2025-04-21 13:13:56 GMT from Italy)
@1
@6
Fedora 42 KDE (and 41) led a double challenge: introducing the still immature KDE 6 with the imperfect Wayland. Fedora has never been - by its nature - a 100% stable distribution, but it is to be regarded as a sufficiently stable RHEL testbed. Take it or leave it.
31 • Fedora Stability (by Anonimous Coward on 2025-04-21 13:28:00 GMT from Brazil)
I am a conservative desktop user that started using Ubuntu LTS in 2006 and Debian in 2007 trying both Gnome 2 and KDE 3. However, I soon moved to XFCE because I felt KDE Plasma 4 transition wasn't stable enough to me at the time - and I couldn't be productive with Unity and Gnome 3.
In 2020 I bought a new laptop and I installed Fedora on it because Debian older ker el was not fully supported. Since then, I have been a reguler Fedora user (XFCE spin) and it has been quite stable to me, however I always use the previous supported version. This means that I was using Fedora 40 and only now I'll update to 41.
I do not dare saying that Fedora is as stable as Debian, but in my experience in the last five years is that Fedora is way more stable and less buggier than Xubuntu LTS!
32 • editors (by grindstone on 2025-04-21 14:05:59 GMT from United States)
I think most of us stick with whatever we learned early (if you were nano to start, you stay nano, etc) For me, that's vi (30-ish years) but only when necessary now as there are times/places for GUI's with dark mode instead of life in a terminal (or gvim w/ bling etc).
Uninstalled Geany after years of usage. Loved the highlighting but, with the files pass through here, always had character set issues.
The rest? Mousepad -- I miss the highlighting but I don't need stylesheets for various dark modes and it handles about character set I throw at it. Leafpad if it's that sort of system instead.
Look at the gedit dep list and look at the mousepad dep list...plus it just works (tm).
If there are big engineering text data files (XX MB), then the vi family will trundle and handle them where sometimes other editors become unwieldy. Sometimes you have to know what you want before you can grep for things... FWIW.
33 • Text Editor (by Robert on 2025-04-21 14:19:13 GMT from United States)
My most used editor is nano in the terminal.
I also use KWrite somewhat frequently, and occasionally Libreoffice Word (not strictly a text editor, but similar enough)
I'm sure I could work comfortably enough in any remotely normal text editor, but not vi/vim. No way. That is the most user unfriendly piece of software I have ever had the displeasure of attempting to use. I would edit text with cat and sed first. Heck, I'd probably even learn awk or ed before resorting to vim.
34 • Editor (by Mike on 2025-04-21 14:23:51 GMT from Germany)
Using helix editor.
35 • @26 Kwrite/Kate (by Robert on 2025-04-21 14:43:04 GMT from United States)
Kwrite and Kate use the exact same text editing widget. They are just UI's for different use-cases
Kwrite is your simple text editor like any other. Kate is more for programming. It's halfway to an IDE really.
36 • CLI editor (by ANO69 on 2025-04-21 15:26:03 GMT from Bulgaria)
I use the built-in editor of Midnight Commander , pretty good even for begginers
(mc -e filename.ext)
37 • Text editor of choice (by Saif on 2025-04-21 15:43:29 GMT from Tunisia)
I tend to use micro, it's always the first package I get on a clean installation. I prefer it mainly of its keyboard shortcuts being similar to moder GUI text editors.
38 • Nano (by DaveT on 2025-04-21 15:46:03 GMT from United Kingdom)
gvim when it is available. Nano if not. And vim only when all else fails! I like the theory behind emacs but could never get to like it.
39 • Fedora 42 (by RetiredIT on 2025-04-21 16:15:54 GMT from United States)
With all the pre-release hoopla surrounding Fedora 42 I was quite disappointed that Jesse had so much trouble testing it. I was especially looking forward to the new installer which I was able to test separately before Fedora 42 was released. The old installer was so dated and cumbersome to use.
Others in the Linux community have concurred. However, I have found from the Distrowatch reader reviews that performing an upgrade from Fedora 41 to 42 went quite well with mostly 10 ratings.
I am running Fedora 41 MATE with great success and will simply wait to upgrade until alll the bugs in Rel 42 are fixed.
40 • Fedora 42 Review (by Slappy McGee on 2025-04-21 16:21:46 GMT from United States)
Jessie's "People who are looking for a reliable, smoothly functioning desktop distribution that will work out of the box will likely be disappointed with this release" is often seen in some form or other in Fedora reviews across many sites. Especially wrt new releases.
Thus the proliferation of Rocky, Alma, Nobara, et al.
Over time most new Fedora releases seem to settle into functionality with tweaks and updates. But meanwhile those others are already fixed nicely for many of us.
41 • command text editor (by Jorge on 2025-04-21 16:58:48 GMT from Argentina)
mcedit .. this should be in the list it is friendly and easy to use
42 • CLI: Nano, GUI: Xed (Text Editors) (by CorpSouth on 2025-04-21 17:51:11 GMT from United States)
I've been rocking Linux Mint Debian Edition lately and sticking to its vanilla offerings, one of those being Xed, the Linux Mint fork of the tried and true Gedit.
It's quite ergonomic for a gui text editor, covers a lot of basics, and more importantly is feature-complete. Nano comes packaged with a loaded configuration file in /etc which is a criminally overlooked fact, once you copy that over to your ~/.config/ directory you'll be set for life having a "more serious" workflow with Nano.
43 • editor: Notepad++ (by Karsten on 2025-04-21 18:03:46 GMT from Germany)
I use Notepad++ in a wine environment. It is a Windows program, but works like a charm.
I have not found any other editor comparable to its ability to be enriched by small utilities (XML, syntax highlighting and the like).
44 • Vim (by MC on 2025-04-21 18:16:21 GMT from United Kingdom)
Many thanks for the 'Questions and answers' column this week, very informative. I didn't know that there was a way to change the behaviour of the arrow keys.
45 • FydeOS ? (by Jan on 2025-04-21 23:47:02 GMT from The Netherlands)
I stumbled over FydeOS, seems to be pretty living. Is in the waiting list.
Can Distrowach spend some testing on it?
46 • FydeOS (by Jesse on 2025-04-21 23:49:04 GMT from Canada)
@45: "I stumbled over FydeOS, seems to be pretty living. Is in the waiting list. Can Distrowach spend some testing on it?"
We did.
https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20231016#fydeos
47 • Console Text Editor (by rob on 2025-04-22 00:05:20 GMT from Australia)
Nice Editor (ne)
48 • Wayland on Fedora (by Toran on 2025-04-22 01:17:58 GMT from Belgium)
Please, stop it. If a distro does not run well on wayland, search one who does the job. I have very good results with Cachy OS and OpenMandriva.
49 • Which is your favourite command line text editor? (by ~hellfire103 on 2025-04-22 01:36:47 GMT from United Kingdom)
Since I discovered it, my favourite editor by far has been Micro (https://micro-editor.github.io/).
50 • Potentially offtopic but running tinycore linux on android (by Jay on 2025-04-22 02:12:30 GMT from United States)
Its potentially off topic but I'd like to run linux on android without the massive implementations like Ubuntu. Furthermore, although alpine linux is supported on proot-distro, it runs using containers and musl, making it very complicated with having robust network stack. Therefore, running tinycore linux with its 17 mb OS and 5 mb minimal implementation of X windows (23 mb total), usably with key programs 100-200 mb on termux would be ideal. Rather than several gigabytes. I can't believe this has not been considered nor implemented after 16 releases of android, I believe there is great potential here to support arm and riscv devices that are minimalist and do not require the utter bloat & security nightmare that POSIX compliance entails. I hope this message can pass to tinycore folks, although they support picore, which is not aimed at termux.
51 • xed (by Will on 2025-04-22 02:19:52 GMT from United States)
xed is the best of the rest after vi.
52 • FydeOS (by Jan on 2025-04-22 02:39:28 GMT from The Netherlands)
@45 + @46
Was indeed tested. Found some comments on it, even from me.
I now tested it.
I used the image for old CPU (and Intel graphics). Extracted it to .img and used Rufus to make a bootable USB.
Booting on a PC with AMD-graphics did not work, booting on Intel-all finally worked (had to wait some time). It asks for a Google-account, I did not want that, but a local-account (with new name+password) is possible.
On my old hardware it worked very well. I even could rotate the display for my portait-mode monitor. The Chromium-browser works without any lagging.
It seems that any application works through using the Chromium-browser. For instance internet-radio can be realised by an browser-extension. And probably an email-client (Thunderbird) is not available, so email must be managed through the browser.
This is probably the ChromeOS-Chromebook way, FydeOS does that pretty well.
However I think I prefer the normal Linux (and Windows) way of applications.
53 • Text editor - Geany preferred (by Andy Prough on 2025-04-22 03:48:50 GMT from Switzerland)
I use whatever CLI editor is available - nano, joe (which should have been a survey option this week), vi, vim, emacs, seems like I've used them all. Nano is probably easiest since it has come by default with most distros for the past 10 years and I've seen it the most often.
But I much prefer opening Geany to work with text files. 'sudo geany file-name' will open just about anything from any kind of programming language, json, html, plain text, whatever, with proper formatting. Very nice and friendly features.
54 • Text Editors (by picamanic on 2025-04-22 06:33:26 GMT from United Kingdom)
I have used "ex" [as in vi/ex and variants] as a pure line editor since the 1990s for code development. If I need to handle parargraphs of flowing "prose", I tend to use Leafpad [small GTK-X11 based utility] or Nvim [derived from Vi]. Both of these can produce word-wrapped screen displays.
55 • text editor (by Alessandro di Roma on 2025-04-22 10:55:59 GMT from Italy)
I use IDLE, the Python’s Integrated Development and Learning Environment
56 • Fedora RAM Hogging (by poker on 2025-04-22 06:55:13 GMT from Germany)
Describing need for over 1.5GB RAM without any work going on as normal is pure insanity.
For what flashy useless energy hogging effects in an underdeveloped release. Thanks
Fedora you have once again opened my eyes to the extent of corporate induced crap in the linux world.
My benchamark distribution based on Debian and using a Highly customised ICEWM
for the desktop starts at around 375 MB RAM, right now with writing from a browser
639 MB. Impossible, no it is called antiX, designed for lightweight efficiency in use, stability is exemplary. No time wasting crashes or need to reboot after updates. It aint windoze after all.
As an editor I prefer Geany. Rarely Leafpad.
57 • Fedora 42 - bleeding edge breaks (by feduser on 2025-04-22 14:18:57 GMT from United Kingdom)
Fedora has been my go to the last year or so now, it is still a bleeding edge distro in my eyes.
Release 42 proves this point:
* Docker engine broke due to some libc issue with iptables-libs and nft (now fixed since 22nd april 2025)
* Zram hibernate/suspend me larky - annoying and memory hog as people finding out
But positive side, the devs are quick to fix the issues - hint to ubuntu/debian team!
Pros and cons i guess.
58 • Fedora vs Kubuntu Plasma experience (by Leinad_ix on 2025-04-22 17:05:22 GMT from Czechia)
@21 Kubuntu 25.04 with Plasma 6.3.4 does not do that. And it uses Wayland but only on 1.1GB ram. And I had same Fedora issue like jesse with super laggy installation on default 4GB in virt-machine.
59 • /e/OS (by Geo on 2025-04-22 18:22:33 GMT from Canada)
I could not be happier with /e/OS 2.9. I needed an employer approved OS to connect personal phone at work. It will be my daily driver going forward. 🙂
60 • Fedora 42 (by Yurkosh on 2025-04-23 00:16:46 GMT from Canada)
No pretence for objectivity: using Fedora for 6months now and it's light on resources, Nvidia runs well (omg, on KDE with Wayland!), upgrade to 42 went smoothly, no bugs, etc., etc. I'm not working for Fedora, it is working for me.
61 • @56 • Fedora RAM Hogging (by Wally on 2025-04-23 02:29:07 GMT from Australia)
"Describing need for over 1.5GB RAM without any work going on as normal is pure insanity." Back in the mid 2000s I bought me a cheapish laptop. It came with 128MB RAM. Windows XP ran, kinda slow, so I upped it to 256MB. Heaven! Then XP exited bitching about the bios. Tried Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS and then brand new Linux Mint. All ran well. Opted for Mint because I preferred the desktop and it was less fiddly about things like WiFi. All were light, very light on resources by today's standards, but they still used over one third of available RAM at idle. Right now I'm on KDE neon. It uses about 1.2GB at idle, and over 2.5GB right now with a Firefox (3 tabs) running. But here's the rub: At idle, it uses less than 10% of available RAM. Right now it's using around 20%. Hardware has moved. So has software. And so have I. Any low-priced PC comes with at least 8GB RAM. So why the fuss?
Oh yes, I know. People out there running old clunkers, and the poor people in the world, (those who haven't moved on to smartphones), have no RAM to spare. For those there is antiX and others on a vegan-like RAM use diet. For everyone else, for us who love to splurge, there's Fedora, Ubuntu and other fat cat distros. We don't bitch about your miserly ones, so give it a break already!
62 • FydeOS (by illumos on 2025-04-23 14:37:42 GMT from Japan)
@52
FydeOS has many issues.
One is that it is a product from a Chinese company and can infringe users' privacy, as Google does with ChromeOS and ChromiumOS.
FydeOS then requests the user's Google account to log in, just like ChromeOS and ChromiumOS.
Additionally, the Chromium used by FydeOS is a regular Chromium (This is spyware) that contains telemetry to Google, and is not an Ungoodled-Chromium, which completely eliminated telemetry.
FydeOS is a ChromeOS that simply transformed developers into Chinese companies.
To truly protect user privacy, while also providing excellent experiences like ChromeOS and ChromiumOS on low-spec devices, "Ungoogled-ChromiumOS" needs to be developed, with no need for a Google account to log in and all telemetry is completely eliminated from the OS.
Why does "Ungoogled-ChromiumOS" not exist?
63 • FydeOS (by Jan on 2025-04-23 15:23:28 GMT from The Netherlands)
@62
Thanks for this interesting info.
PS
When I tested FydeOS in live mode, I found out that any applications run through using the browser. I tried a few apps as browser extensions, several of them did not work.
So FydeOS, despite working not-sluggish on my old hardware, is not advisable (and certainly with your info).
UnGoogled-ChromiumOS would indeed be a nice option.
64 • Pulsar Text Editor (by Hayden James on 2025-04-23 22:40:51 GMT from United States)
I really like Pulsar: A Community-led Hyper-Hackable Text Editor. (https://pulsar-edit.dev/)
65 • KDE6 Wayland (by Toran on 2025-04-24 00:16:57 GMT from Belgium)
I read here a lot of crap. KDE6 is already mature. It runs perfect on Cachy OS and OpenMandriva. Both with wayland.
Thing is, get a decent nvidia GPU. I run a RTX 30xx 6GB. Not really expensive, but really good.
66 • Why doesn't it exist (by whatsup on 2025-04-24 03:24:45 GMT from Australia)
@62 "Ungoogled-Chromium OS" does not exist, like many things, because no one has developed it - feel free to do so if you see such a need for it instead of expecting someone else to do it
67 • Micro forever (by Jesito on 2025-04-24 06:18:45 GMT from Spain)
Much more intuitive than nano, good mouse integration, CTL-C/CTL-V to copy/paste, much other nicer functions. It's worth to try.
68 • @69 • Post by Hank on RAM Hogging (by Wally on 2025-04-24 12:10:33 GMT from Australia)
"Continuing to use old computers is, as long as they cope with use case is common sense and not in the slightest miserly." I'm sure! But a distro using 1.5GB RAM when 16GB is available is insanity? Did you actually read the post I replied to? Do what you want! Use what you want! Just stop carping about what other people choose to do.
I have 2 computers, both several years old. Nothing fancy. Not expensive machines. No discrete graphic cards. Yet they can both be upgraded to 32GB RAM. Memory is cheap. So what if a distro uses 5 or 10% at idle? It dos the job, does it well and I enjoy it.
I have nothing against vegans, but I do detest vegan evangelists. In fact, I detest evangelists of any kind, including those who think I should be using whatever RAM saving distro they espouse or I must be insane or some kind of heretic. Wanna ride a bike to save the planet? More power to you! Go right ahead! Just leave me in peace to enjoy my comfortable, air conditioned car.
69 • timeshift in fedora (by dolphin oracle on 2025-04-24 18:52:03 GMT from United States)
its worth looking at the mount points used to make the BTRFS root partition. If I remember correctly, / must be on a @ subvolume, as that is the only subvolume designator that timeshift will look for. If you don't have a subvolume, which is possible as well, then that also won't work with timeshift.
70 • Ed is the standard text editor (by Cág on 2025-04-24 20:13:57 GMT from Germany)
Using ed and nothing but ed daily, at home and at work.
71 • The editors I will NOT use... (by tom joad on 2025-04-24 22:34:40 GMT from Canada)
First is VI. Nope. No thanks, be gone with you. I know the 'purists' like it and maybe a bit haute about discussing its virtues. Having none of it.
Not for me. I view most all tools from the point of view of 'I gotta get *stuff* done. I don't have the time or the inclination of learning a 'cutisy' text editor I don't even like just to say stuff like 'Yeah, I use VI.'
Add VIM to that list and emacs and Kate and Joe. And throw in most of all the myraid of other editors I never hear of. Let me explain; I install a lot of stuff I like and use and that is useful to me. For example, I discovered glances the other day. I literally said out loud 'stuff fire! I like that!' And I have installed it everywhere. I find glances better than htop or top or even terminator.
I have never, ever installed a simple text editor. Not even once. Never even thought about it.
I use what is available just like supper; I eat whats on the table. To me it is just that simple.
LIke I said, I got *stuff* to do.
72 • editors (by Gary W on 2025-04-25 02:52:23 GMT from Australia)
In violent agreement with @33, vi is the worst editor ever invented, like hammering nails with your fist. Google up its author Bill Joy's comments, he didn't like it either.
I've learned the utter basics for the few occasions when there's nothing else available. Otherwise, I use, in order, nano, mcedit, and joe, which cover 99% of my requirements. Things like awk and sed cover the last 1%.
73 • vi (by vmc on 2025-04-25 05:56:17 GMT from United States)
@33 and @72, you don't like vi because you don't understand it. Like anything else in life.
Give someone timber, saw, nails, and if their not a carpenter, they would think these tools don't work.
Coming from a Unix background, all we had at the time was ed, sed and some Unix redirection tools. When vi came along we thought it was the greatest tool we had.
vi's powerful if you take the time to learn it. Regular Expressions is its biggest asset.
cheat sheet : https://www.atmos.albany.edu/daes/atmclasses/atm350/vi_cheat_sheet.pdf
74 • favourite command line text editor... (by rhtoras on 2025-04-25 11:17:35 GMT from Greece)
Nano imho but i also like micro or vim. Nano is simple. On bsd i use Vi.
75 • Text editors (by Megani Kalideva on 2025-04-25 13:59:31 GMT from United States)
Geany is so nice, but I do have to change a ton of settings on a new install before it’s palatable. I think even the split screen is an add-on?
76 • command line editors (by paul on 2025-04-25 23:03:19 GMT from United Kingdom)
I love the editor that comes with midnight commander, I always install them.
77 • OS wars (by Canweall Getalong on 2025-04-25 23:46:42 GMT from United States)
OS wars collection:
* Os wars - Win vs Mac vs Linux vs BeOS
* Browser wars - Internet Explorer vs Netscape Navigator; then Edge vs Firefox vs Crome
* Office suite wars - MS Office vs Wordperfect vs Lotus vs Libre Office
* DE wars - KDE vs Gnome
* Init wars - SysV vs Runit vs Upstart vs Systemd
* Text editor wars - VI vs Vim vs GVim vs Emacs
Can't wait for AI and Quantum computing...
78 • NVidia drivers on OpenMandriva (by Ovejaexplosiva on 2025-04-26 05:08:05 GMT from Argentina)
@65 how did you install the proprietary NVidia drivers on OpenMandriva? The last time I tried OM, forums were a mess and documentation was quite lacking tbh.
Number of Comments: 78
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| • Issue 1159 (2026-02-09): Sharing files on a network, isolating processes on Linux, LFS to focus on systemd, openSUSE polishes atomic updates, NetBSD not likely to adopt Rust code, COSMIC roadmap |
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| • Issue 1116 (2025-04-07): The Sense HAT, Android and mobile operating systems, FreeBSD improves on laptops, openSUSE publishes many new updates, Fedora appoints new Project Leader, UBports testing VoLTE |
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| • Issue 1112 (2025-03-10): Solus 4.7, distros which work with Secure Boot, UBports publishes bug fix, postmarketOS considers a new name, Debian running on Android |
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| • Issue 1109 (2025-02-17): Rhino Linux 2025.1, MX Linux 23.5 with Xfce 4.20, replacing X.Org tools with Wayland tools, GhostBSD moving its base to FreeBSD -RELEASE, Redox stabilizes its ABI, UBports testing 24.04, Asahi changing its leadership, OBS in dispute with Fedora |
| • Issue 1108 (2025-02-10): Serpent OS 0.24.6, Aurora, sharing swap between distros, Peppermint tries Void base, GTK removinglegacy technologies, Red Hat plans more AI tools for Fedora, TrueNAS merges its editions |
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BeaFanatIX
BeaFanatIX was an Ubuntu-based mini live CD with utilities borrowed from KNOPPIX. It was developed by a small group of developers who have forked the successful, but discontinued BeatrIX distribution and added new features and scripts. The main purpose of BeaFanatIX was to provide a small, installable live CD, with good documentation and easy-to-use applications for a variety of desktop tasks.
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